From Inside and Out, Climate Panel Is Pushed to Change

[Cees Binkhorst]

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http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/from-inside-and-out-climate-panel-pushed-to-change/
  January 26, 2010, 8:12 am
 From Inside and Out, Climate Panel Is Pushed to Change
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

There is growing pressure on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, from within and without, to change some practices to ensure the
credibility of its future reports.

The latest push came on Monday in New Delhi, where leaders of countries
that formed an influential bloc at last month’s Copenhagen climate talks
were meeting to assess next steps. The Business Standard of India quoted
Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform
Commission, as calling for the panel’s next set of reports to contain a
broader set of scientific viewpoints on evidence for global warming:

     “We need to adopt an open attitude to scientific research and
incorporate all views…. Scientists are waiting for the fifth assessment
report and amongst us, we will enhance cooperation in the report to make
it more comprehensive.”

The climate panel was created in 1988 under United Nations auspices to
periodically review factors, human and natural, influencing climate and
assess possible ways to limit risks. While it shared the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize, it has been under fire in recent weeks over disclosures of
errors and unsubstantiated conclusions in its reports and charges of
potential conflicts of interest.

Some of the pressure is coming from within the leadership of the group.
In e-mail exchanges and phone conversations with half a dozen panel
authors over the last few days, it became evident that there is a split.
Some panel scientists feel the recent disclosures about unsubstantiated
predictions of the vanishing of Himalayan glaciers, debate over
statements made about disasters and climate and other issues will blow
over. Others see a clear need for an open exploration of ways to add
more transparency and objectivity on top of the many steps taken in two
decades of work.

One of the people in that camp is Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton
University, a lead author on several past and future panel reports, who
said in an e-mail message: “I.P.C.C. is a continuously evolving, complex
and ultimately extremely important process which is already vastly more
transparent and more accountable than it was at the time of its first
assessment, 20 years ago. It is also more transparent and accountable
than any other scientific assessment process I know of. In fact, given
the close scrutiny I.P.C.C. reports are subject to after publication,
the rarity of such episodes speaks well for the I.P.C.C. process. But
the stakes are high and one failure like this is one too many. We can
and should do better.”

His full comment is below.

After each of its four reports so far — including the pivotal 2007
assessment that concluded with 90 percent confidence that greenhouse
gases from humans were the main force behind recent warming –- the panel
leadership has met to consider changing how it works. But these sessions
have all been “self-examination,” in the words of one senior panel
scientist. Maybe it’s time for a broader review of the panel’s
procedures and products, one involving not only the scientists
conducting the assessments but also the public in some way (after all,
the citizens of the countries that created the climate panel pay the bills).

One issue is how to represent accurately the range of reasoned views on
critical questions like the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases
(basically, how warm the world will get from a particular rise in gas
concentrations); how fast and far seas will rise; how ecosystems will,
or won’t, respond.

Last March, more than 100 past lead authors of report chapters met in
Hawaii to chart next steps for the panel’s inquiries. One presenter
there was John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama,
Huntsville, who has focused on using satellites to chart global
temperatures. He was a lead author of a section of the third climate
report, in 2001, but is best known these days as a critic of the more
heated warnings that climate is already unraveling under the buildup of
heat-trapping gases.

At the Hawaii meeting, he gave a presentation proposing that future
reports contain a section providing the views of credentialed scientists
publishing in the peer-reviewed literature whose views on particular
points differ from the consensus. He provided both his poster and
summary of his three-minute talk. In an e-mail message to me, he
described the reaction this way (L.A. is short for lead author; AR5 is
shorthand for the next report, coming in 2013-14.):

     The reception to my comments was especially cold … not one
supporter, though a couple of scientists did say I had a “lot of guts”
to stand up and say what I said before 140 L.A.s. I was (and still am)
calling for the AR5 to be a more open scientific assessment in which
those of us who are well-credentialed and have evidence for low climate
sensitivity (observational and theoretical) be given room to explain
this. We should have the same standards of review authority too. When a
subject is excruciatingly complicated, like climate, we see that
opinion, overstatement, and appeal-to-authority tend to reign as those
of a like-mind essentially take control in their self-constructed
echo-chamber. The world needs to see all sides of the evidence. We in
the climate business need to understand humility, not pride, when
looking at a million degrees-of-freedom problem. It’s just fine to say,
“We don’t know,” when that is the truth of the matter.

I also asked him, “Do you see a way forward for this enterprise
(presuming you see these recent issues as serious problems but not a
fatal indictment)?” He said:

     I think people would read AR5 if it were a true scientific
assessment, complete with controversies [described] by the experts
themselves. Policymakers will find it uncomfortable, because the simple
fact remains that our ignorance of the climate system is enormous.
Otherwise, it will be a repeat of what we are now seeing (and what many
folks like me knew years ago), that the process has morphed into an
agenda-approving exercise.

Chris Field, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution and
Stanford University who will lead the writing of the next panel report
on impacts from climate change, said he agreed that outliers should be
accounted for. But he noted that there are plenty on both sides of
important scientific debates, including many researchers finding that
warming could be far higher than the predominant view.

Dr. Field’s reaction echoes views expressed on the workings of the
climate panel last year by David Victor, a specialist in climate policy
at the University of California, San Diego:

     On balance, I.P.C.C. is doing a decent job of sustaining public
support and assuring as much transparency as is feasible. I am impressed
by the time that folks commit to those missions in light of the fact
that the vast majority of I.P.C.C.’s labor operates on a volunteer basis.

     In my view, the much bigger issue for the future is elsewhere. It
is in how I.P.C.C. deals with “outliers” and with poorly organized
disciplines. The flap about sea level is a reminder that I.P.C.C.
doesn’t work well on topics that are outside the normal bounds of
consensus science — yet those “extremes” are key to understanding the
tails of the distributions, especially those that relate to possible
catastrophic changes in climate systems. Since one of the key rationales
for climate policy is managing the tails, that’s a big problem. And the
other problem is how to review the “science” in fields of research that
don’t have strong paradigms — including most of the social sciences
(outside economics). In fields with strong paradigms it is the paradigm
— its basic axioms, its key journals, its “moosehead” figures who are
the widely accepted experts and arbiters — that helps determine “truth.”
In fields where people don’t agree on the paradigm (akin to the laws of
physics) it is hard to frame any meaningful consensus in an
I.P.C.C.-like setting. This, in my view, is why most of the social
sciences are irrelevant to I.P.C.C. — along with the fact that most of
what those fields study is politically charged. The politics is what
gets the attention, but it is really the intellectual discipline that’s
the problem. Those two fronts are where I think I.P.C.C. really must toil.

Here’s Michael Oppenheimer’s full comment on the issue:

     There is nothing troubling about a decision to emphasize those
aspects of the science that are of special concern to policy makers. In
deciding what to emphasize in both the summaries for policy makers and
the underlying chapters, I.P.C.C. authors necessarily must chose from
millions of facts and statements they might potentially publish, all of
which are extraordinarily interesting to many scientists. But the
reality is that only a limited number can be presented due to space
limitations and the need to focus on material that is broadly useful. So
that decision doesn’t bother me at all.

     But a more serious question then arises: did the authors let their
strong interest in the issue cause them to throw caution to the wind and
press forward a statement based on weak evidence with a pedigree (i.e.,
not peer reviewed) that called for further exploration of the matter,
and did they ignore critical review comments in the process? Not having
been privy to the authors’ discussions, I can’t answer this one. In my
40 years as a scientist, I have certainly seen some of my colleagues,
acting in their role as normal human beings, occasionally get carried
away in their enthusiasm and let nons-cientific biases affect the way
they represent their scientific judgment to the public. It doesn’t
happen often, but it does happen. That’s one reason why I.P.C.C. has a
multi-layered review process.

     This naturally leads to the third issue, which ought to be the main
focus of any exploration of what went wrong: why did the safeguards
fail? And how might they be improved in order to provide a means for
scientists and governments to collaborate successfully to assess
information and provide useful insights to policy makers, while
maintaining the confidence of the global public?

     I.P.C.C. is a continuously evolving, complex and ultimately
extremely important process which is already vastly more transparent and
more accountable than it was at the time of its first assessment, 20
years ago. It is also more transparent and accountable than any other
scientific assessment process I know of. In fact, given the close
scrutiny I.P.C.C. reports are subject to after publication, the rarity
of such episodes speaks well for the I.P.C.C. process. But the stakes
are high and one failure like this is one too many. We can and should do
better.

Finally, Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and specialist in
the intersection of climate and disasters at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, has been deeply critical of the climate panel for years,
contending that it misrepresented work he co-authored and is mired in
conflicts of interest. He is one of three climate researchers who
co-wrote an opinion column for the German publication Spiegel Online,
calling for substantial changes.

Here’s how he described a path forward in an e-mail message (I added the
links):

     1. If I.P.C.C. is to be the most credible scientific body then it
needs to have the highest standards for dealing with conflicts of
interest and bias — presently it has none. Such standards were discussed
in a Bipartisan Policy Commission Report that I helped write last year
for how the Obama Administration could improve its scientific advisory
processes. The guidelines are appropriate in I.P.C.C. context as well.
In short, disclosure, transparency, criteria for conflicts of interest
and explicit mechanisms for dealing with conflicts and bias.

     2. The I.P.C.C. needs to clarify its role in providing advice (what
advice? to whom?) and to whom it is accountable. Right now there is an
“anything goes” impression. This would mean clarifying its role in
advocacy, with respect to policy advice, and also, how its topics are
chosen and experts selected.

     In the language of my book, the I.P.C.C. could simultaneously play
the role of a science arbiter and honest broker of policy options. But
to do so would require some significant institutional reform. Right now
it operates as a “stealth issue advocate” — that is, hiding advocacy in
the cloth of science.

[UPDATE, 10:22 p.m.: Andrew Weaver, a longtime panel author and
climatologist at the University of Victoria, said, "I think the I.P.C.C.
needs a fundamental shift."]

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